7 - L’amalgame

Summary

As a mechanism of social control, the post-Liberation amalgame of l’armée d’Afrique and the FFI of the internal resistance might be considered a partial success, insofar as it formed part of a larger Gaullist strategy to reestablish a legal state and curtail the temporary anarchy of the Liberation. But it failed to repair French civil–military relations, further strained by defeat and widespread military support for Vichy. Some of the more politicized FFI rejected l’amalgame altogether, to remain politically active in Paris, Toulouse, and elsewhere. L’amalgame’s military utility is more debatable. In one respect, l’amalgame was the only option open to the GPRF to replenish its exhausted Anfa divisions desperate for replacements. Optics were also a factor, as one goal of l’amalgame, and its corollary the blanchiment – that is substituting FFI for Senegalese in de Lattre’s 1ère Armée – was to reinforce the Gaullist mantra that France had been liberated by its own people, not by empire and the Allies. But insofar as it was a product of military necessity, l’amalgame lacked means. In the straightened circumstances of the Liberation, training for France’s new soldiers was ad hoc and piecemeal, with weapons in short supply and logistics dependent on the Americans at the very moment the 1ère Armée was to face one of the most challenging campaigns of the war in Alsace. In this respect, l’amalgame might be considered a “semi-failure.” The experiment of amalgamating FFI units as distinct organizations had been completely abandoned by early 1945, as the CFLN transformed itself into a provisional republic (GPRF) that began the divisive process of purging Vichy aparatchiks from the government and military, and punishing French women who had fraternized with German occupiers. It remained to be seen in the invasion of Germany whether France could field only une armée en trompe l’œil. In the meantime, many of the Vichy loyalists were evacuated to Sigmaringen, accompanied by a rump of Francs-Gardes and their families. Few of the collaborators who evacuated to Germany to be integrated into what became the Charlemagne Division Germany survived.